Robin Gibb’s Beautiful Warble

Updated: Robin Gibb died on Sunday, May 20th, at the age of sixty-two.

It’s odd to regard one of the best-selling recording artists of all time as an acquired taste, but many listeners find the music of the brothers Gibb, better known as the British (by way of Australia) band the Bee Gees, hard to connect with. Their songs are widespread enough that a lack of familiarity isn’t the issue. The long arc of their career, from the syrupy melodrama of their late-sixties pop/rock period through their white soul metamorphosis into disco icons, is a triumph of reinvention to some, an exercise in kitsch to others, and simply inscrutable to the rest. To these last I offer something of a Rosetta Stone: the relatively overlooked Robin Gibb, whose singularly quavering voice was the emotional centerpiece of the band. At this moment, he is sadly lying comatose in a London hospital with pneumonia, following a recent battle with colon and liver cancer. His illness has occasioned a wellspring of goodwill, but missing in the outpouring of sympathy is a clear sense of what made his role in the group so special.

I unexpectedly learned to appreciate the Bee Gees through Robin’s contributions. Alongside his elder brother Barry and his fraternal twin Maurice, Robin was the improbable one: awkward, buck-toothed and gawky, with an unruly mop of bouffant hair. In contrast, Barry (he of the piercing falsetto that would characterize later recordings) was a natural front man—handsome, tall, and assured. The brothers were initially marketed as young, wholesome rivals to the Beatles, but there was something of the misfit about Robin. He was only seventeen when the Bee Gees released their first international album, in 1967. He split lead-vocal duties with Barry and was featured on the single “Holiday,” an emotive minor-key composition that unfolds from a dirge-like wisp into full-fledged chamber pop:

One might expect that the morbid hysterics of the latter would make it a poor candidate for the hit parade, but it reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100. Guileless and vulnerable, irrepressibly melancholic, Robin’s distinctive voice was the vaguely unbalanced element that kept the listener on edge.

I grew up with the Bee Gees’ early and later recordings among my parents’ records, but I didn’t revisit the earlier albums until a little over a decade ago, when I reached the conclusion that the group was at its best when Robin’s warbly tenor was dominant. This idea had apparently struck him as well. In 1969, high on the wave of what Barry would call their “first fame,” the band recorded their most self-consciously artistic statement: “Odessa,” a double-album song cycle about shipwreck and dashed romance, encased in a red-velvet sleeve. Robin took it as his moment to shine, and he was in full adenoidal operatic splendor on the epic opener, “Odessa (City on the Black Sea)”:

A lush collection of symphonic rock music, “Odessa”’s grandiose ambition played to Robin’s strengths, but he was dissatisfied, groaning about a lack of credit. Still a teen-ager, oversensitive and insecure by his own admission, Robin clashed with Barry over the decision to release the saccharine “First of May” as a single instead of Robin’s soaring “Lamplight.”

(If you compare the two, I think you’ll find that he had a point.) Amid recriminations exchanged in the press, Robin quit the group.

The Bee Gees had been a five-piece band, but the rupture changed everything. Barry and Maurice went on as a duo while Robin launched a solo career. It began auspiciously enough with the success of his first single, “Saved by the Bell,” a heavily orchestrated verse/chorus number underpinned by a spare drum-machine beat. The song reached No. 2 on the British charts, despite its peculiar construction:

It was a dry run for the less successful album that followed, “Robin’s Reign,” an idiosyncratic mix of strings, drum machine, and massed vocal overdubs. Though it could hardly have been his intent, the album seemed the work of an outsider pop artist, enveloped in eccentric melodrama. (The eccentricity is no joke, but the details aren’t especially kind. As the Daily Mail tabloid once helpfully summarized, “A teetotaler and ardent vegan, he is also a one-time shoplifter, arsonist and amphetamine addict. He enjoys an open marriage to a bisexual female druid and poetess.” He fathered a child with their housekeeper in 2009.) Robin would later say that it was released prematurely. In and out of print (mostly out) for years, the record developed a following of devoted partisans.

It was the aborted follow-up, a 1970 album called “Sing Slowly Sisters,” that firmly established his cult following on the periphery of the Bee Gees macrocosm. Bootleggers circulated spectral recordings of exploratory songs whose low fidelity made them sound as though they were beamed from a distant star. This is particularly true of the title track—a woeful song of a soldier headed to war—with an accompaniment of horns, strings, and organ that contorts sonically into incidental frequencies reminiscent of a synthesizer, lending it a uniquely eerie quality.

Echoey, gossamer songs like “Avalanche” and “Sky West and Crooked,” both consisting of little more than guitar and multi-tracked vocals, present Robin as a forerunner of the dream pop that would begin to flood out of Britain a decade later.

Alas, the album was never officially released, remaining an isolated fetish for curious Gibb enthusiasts. The brothers reconciled later the same year and began afresh—the first songs they wrote upon reuniting were the hits “Lonely Days” and “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.” Their chart fortunes then diminished over the next few years before “Jive Talkin’ ” hit No. 1 in the U.S., in 1975, setting the stage for the disco renaissance that would overshadow their earlier career. Even then, Robin had the capacity to surprise, featuring on the 1978 Muppet disco tie-in, “Sesame Street Fever.” (Listen to “Trash,” a swanky ode to rubbish whose irresistible groove raises it to the level of cultural commentary. You’d be forgiven for forgetting its place on a children’s record.)

Robin’s family is reportedly playing music and singing to him in an attempt to bring him out of his coma. I hope the songs reaching him sound as extraordinary as his own.

Photograph Robin Gibb by Ian Tyas/Keystone/Getty Images

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